Good news continues to roll in relating to the state of Georgia’s unemployment rate.

The Georgia Department of Labor announced Thursday that Georgia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased to 7.4 percent, down two-tenths of a percentage point from a revised 7.6 percent rate in November.

State Labor Commissioner Mark Butler hopes this is a continuing trend.

“Its really good news, especially when you consider back in July we were at 8.8 percent, so we have had several months with consecutive improvements and we hope to see that continue”, said Butler.

Down a total of 1.3 percent from last December, Butler said the state picked up a large amount of new jobs over the last twelve months.

“We’ve seen over the last twelve months, if you compare December of this year to December of last year, the state has picked up over ninety thousand jobs”, said Butler. “That is a very good number, and one of the better numbers we have seen in some time.”

One slightly negative bit of news was the increase of initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits, which increased by nearly 95 percent from November.

Butler isn’t too worried about that spike though.

“We did see initial claims spike last month, and as we looked into those numbers to see where that was coming from, almost all of that was temporary lay-offs and what they call partial claims”, explained Butler.

The overall number of unemployed Georgians decreased to just a hair below 350,000; down by over 12,000 from last month.

That is the fewest amount of unemployed Georgians since October 2008 when there were just under 347,000 unemployed.